Mostly, when a CEO asks for feedback, the responses are vague: “You’re doing fine”, “I can’t think of anything” or “Leave this with me, I’ll come back to you later” (but they never do). This is insufficient for leadership growth.

You need feedback just as much as your team does. A disciplined leader is a relentless student and that should include getting feedback on your performance from your team.

However, as a CEO, your team members might be hesitant to give feedback for several reasons. If they give positive feedback, it may seem like they are ingratiating themselves. If they give negative feedback, they might fear negative consequences.

Some members of your team will have useful ideas but feel unqualified to critique their boss, leading to little or no meaningful feedback.

One way to overcome this is through a structured 360-degree feedback process. This allows you to receive feedback from multiple sources, including your chairperson, board members and direct reports. Over time, as people grow more comfortable, feedback will improve in quality and depth.

Restricted feedback loop

Over two-and-a-half decades as a CEO, I rarely received feedback from my team, outside of a 360-degree approach. The only person who would give me honest feedback was the head of HR.

My boss, the chairman or a global CEO would give me feedback twice a year at the formal appraisal times, but their feedback could never be as accurate as the team who worked with me every single day.

Their feedback was more of a KPI review because that’s what they could evaluate. They rarely saw how my leadership behaviors were driving the business and didn’t have any insight into poor leadership behaviors that may be demotivating to the team.

Occasionally, a direct report might give me feedback, but well after the event had happened. It was too big a gap, and that would frustrate me. I would think, ‘If I’d only known this six months ago’. I loved getting feedback and did my best to respond and improve.

Empowering team feedback

No matter where you are in your career, we can all learn and improve as leaders from clear feedback on our impactful leadership behaviors.

I developed a safe and powerful approach to help leaders create an environment for their teams that is conducive to useful feedback: Prior to your next leadership team meeting, select a spokesperson.

Make sure it’s someone you trust who has the personal confidence to obtain feedback from the leadership team and then be able to provide you with honest feedback. It’s often the HR leader, chief of staff, COO or a co-founder. Be clear about what you want to learn and what you’re asking from the team.

In the meeting, explain that you require the team’s feedback to continue your growth as a leader. Ask the spokesperson to facilitate a discussion with the team with you out of the room. Have the spokesperson ask these five questions and document the answers:

• What does the team appreciate about your leadership? Ideally providing examples of behaviors that are most positive and impactful.

• Where are you not as effective? Example areas could be your lack of follow-up; your lack of discipline leading to meetings being late or cancelled; your lack of prioritization of mentoring your team; your poor presentation skills; your feedback being demotivating and critical as opposed to constructive and supportive; or when you are stressed, it is clear to the organization and you are not seen as ‘a person of hope’.

• What behaviors could you change or improve as their leader to better support them? For example, stop cancelling or deferring meetings, invest one hour a month with each leader for formal mentoring and coaching or be clearer on the strategic initiatives to drive the business toward the vision.

• How can you more positively impact the organization? For example, monthly all-hands meetings, a formal recognition program, better clarity and stronger reinforcement of the company’s values.

• What would they do differently if they were the CEO?

How you accept feedback is critical

After the leadership meeting, the spokesperson should consider and aggregate the feedback, which may take a few days. Their job is to identify core themes on what you are doing well and where you can improve while keeping the individual’s feedback from the leadership team confidential.

This can be challenging, as examples are extremely useful for you but may enable you to determine who gave the feedback – this is a fine line to tread for the facilitator. Once the feedback is aggregated, arrange a time to meet with them one-on-one to hear it.

Be open, non-defensive and appreciative. You can inquire and try to understand more about the discussion, but do that without focusing on trying to work out who said what. Instead, focus on better understanding the point so you can adjust your leadership behavior.

At your next leadership team meeting, thank the group for the feedback and summarize some of the key changes you plan to make because of their feedback.

Repeat this feedback gathering at least once a year. Over time, you will find the feedback gets better and clearer as the team learns to trust the process.

This is an edited extract from Discipline beats vision: How to be the leader your company needs starting Monday by Dane Hudson.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.